Authors: Alice Adams
Of his three suite-mates, two were from Andover, the other from St. Paul’s; all three seemed more adjusted to and less intimidated by Harvard than he—but then, the same was true of everyone else he saw. Pierce and Bradley were both ex– and probably future track stars, real jocks. Pierce planned to concentrate in Gov. (his father was someone important in Washington right now); Bradley thought probably Econ., and then the business school. Paxton Sedgwick, from St. Paul’s, was the least jock-like of the three, although the tallest. He was thin and soft-spoken, certainly the least threatening. Paxton wanted to study American History and Lit., a new field of concentration—with a famous and controversial political-leftist scholar. Paxton had read some of Russ Byrd’s poetry, which he admired. Or he said he did. But he seemed to know not to ask too much, no dumb questions about what Russ was “really like.”
It seemed to Graham that the handsome faces, the tall or small terrific bodies that he saw in the Yard were constantly new, some principle of beauty perpetually renewed. New faces, but also ones that he came to recognize as almost familiar, some that he looked forward to or searched out. There was the dark blond man in the Navy, a tall trim officer, with his Navy raincoat and his hat—and the smaller brown-haired one in tweed who smoked a pipe, or at least always carried one around. And the very slightly plump blond guy in his sailor suit, with a shy, fey look of Peter Pan.
And Graham thought, Which—oh which one for me? Then sternly telling himself, None, not one, you goddam little fool. You’re the only little fairy pansy queer at Harvard. Then, mustering what logic, what rationality he could, he knew this to be unlikely; still, that was how he felt.
Bad jokes about people like him circulated:
“Do you know why there’re no stairs in Dunster House?
It’s full of fairies, they fly up and down.”
Sometimes, daringly (although he hardly had a choice; he saw no way out), Graham took part in group discussions on this topic.
Pierce said that at his sister’s school, in Virginia, some girl had a big crush on another girl; there were intercepted letters, found by some super-wary teacher, saying, according to Pierce’s sister, “these really sicky things, about touching breasts and stuff.”
Shudders around the room at this shocking revelation: “Girls touching tits—oh, yuck.”
What happened finally was that the school expelled both girls; it seemed the only way to quiet things down.
It was Paxton who said, “That seems hard cheese for the one who was just the object of the crush. I mean, she didn’t write any letters, did she? She was probably embarrassed.”
No one agreed with him—except Graham, who did not dare speak.
The other boys, the Andover jocks, were as one in their view that the girl who was the object of the unspeakable “crush” must have done something herself to bring it on. She must have been asking for it in some way. “I mean,” Bradley tried to sum up their joint feelings, “how come the queer one chose that girl out of all the other girls in the school?”
“Still seems unfair to throw her out of school,” Paxton muttered.
And Graham, silent, agreed, of course he did, at the same time that he thought, What an incredible ass of a girl to write letters like that! Lord God, girls! He further resolved that if anyone made any kind of a gesture of that nature he would
turn them down flat, no matter how handsome they might be; they could easily turn out to be a spy for Harvard, trying to seek out and expel all queers.
It was much easier all around in Pinehill. In his secret heart Graham knew; he knew how he felt and what he was, but no one else seemed even curious about him, in that way. His mother, Deirdre, made excuses for him, although probably she did know what she was doing.
“Graham’s in some ways a little young for his age—”
“Graham isn’t really interested in girls yet, thank the Lord!”
“Graham is much more advanced in his head than he is in other ways—”
“Someways Graham doesn’t favor his daddy at all—”
“I guess I’ve always babied Graham, starting out like I did pretty much by myself—”
“Graham’s always been kind of small for his age, could be that keeps a boy young—”
Sometimes, even, remembering his mother’s pretty, silly voice, Graham could still miss Pinehill. He missed mostly the weather there, and the things in bloom, especially in the dirty Cambridge March, when everything was cold and gray and wet. Without meaning. Whereas, in Pinehill, Deirdre wrote (and Melanctha too; he’d had a surprisingly long letter from her), the dogwood had suddenly burst out all over; back in the darker woods it was frothy like fountains, and big creamy magnolia blossoms and the most beautiful rhododendrons of any season ever. Reading his letters and thinking of Pinehill brought quick hot tears to Graham’s eyes, even as he told himself, in one of his familiar litanies, You dumb little sentimental fag, you’re just lonesome without your silly mum—and horny too.
In her letter, Melanctha also said that Benny Davis, the Negro boy who had been Abby Baird’s friend up in Connecticut when they were little kids (and who was supposed to be extremely good-looking now), was coming to Pinehill to visit Abby; they were all wondering how that would work out. Melanctha thought Dolly Bigelow should throw a party for him (joke).
Graham remembered almost nothing of his earliest years, in California. They had not lived on the coast, his mother told him, but quite far inland, in Sacramento. Nevertheless, that ocean was what Graham remembered: a coarse gray beach, at the foot of some crevassed green-gray cliffs, and gentle, small, but very cold waves that had lapped at his bare feet, too cold for wading. “I guess we would’ve gone over there for a picnic or something,” Deirdre told him. “My dad really took to the fishing out there. Although I can’t say as I remember any wading days at a beach. California to my mind was really cold, except in the summer when Sacramento anyways was hotter than blazes.” Graham did not remember anything hot as blazes, or hotter. He did remember gray, gray clouded air that people out there called fog but that seemed to him more like rain.
Insofar as he had academic ambitions, or intentions, Graham’s were not poetic; God knows what he wanted to be (he wanted to be heterosexual—oh Christ! he wanted to be
normal
, hopelessly yearned for just plain normal). He was sure he did not want to be a poet. Well, easy enough, he told himself, just don’t write poetry. And, easy enough: just don’t do anything
sexual with boys—Graham had as yet no clear idea of just what it was that boys did together beyond kissing and touching, touching all over, he guessed; what he thought of when he dared to think of it at all as Mutual M. The scoutmaster at home, Mr. Mountjoy, had told Graham that in France men kissed each other, but he had not wanted to kiss Mr. Mountjoy, who got mad.
However, partly because it worked out with his schedule, Graham took a course that spring called Criticism of Poetry, which required him to read poets he had barely heard of before: Yeats, Auden, John Donne, T. S. Eliot. “What they have in common, at least in my own view, which is to predominate in this class”—a slight twist to his small tight mouth that the class later came to recognize as a smile—“what they have in common is excellence. Also, as some of you have no doubt noted, all are English, except for Mr. Eliot, who became so by adoption, and Mr. Yeats, who was Irish, which is closer than he would have cared to admit.” Again the tiny twist, the semi-smile. This professor was short and bald, pale, with intense, burning dark brown eyes—eyes that, Graham imagined, saw everything, even himself; Graham sometimes had a sense of being noticed, observed by this distant and brilliant man, this famous scholar. Which was probably not true, he thought; or it was true that he was noticed, but only because he was there on the second row. (B for Byrd got Graham into many second rows, alphabetically speaking.) He, the professor, was given to discreetly elegant shirts and ties, smooth dark suits (actually all from London), tidy socks, and impeccably polished shoes.
He read aloud, this professor, in a low but penetrating near monotone, a voice that was tightly controlled, but still his passion for the words, the words of the poets, came through.
He read: “And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die!” and “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” and “April is the cruellest month … mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots …”
And, in an apologetic, hesitant way, he said, “I am purposefully choosing the most available, the most popular—the most trite, if you will—of their lines, in the hope that you will be seduced into lifetimes of further reading. Of such glorious pleasure.”
Graham was indeed seduced. He left each class in a state of blind euphoria, seeing no one, aware only of those words—and of weather, April, the cruelest month, but so beautiful in its way, in New England.
Alone, as though furtively, he read more and more of those poets. And he developed a special feeling for W. H. Auden, as yet unmentioned in class. On one of the book jackets there was a photograph of Auden, of that long, lined hyperintelligent, sensitive, witty face. Graham wished that his father had looked like that, in fact that his father had been Wystan Auden instead of handsome American Southern Russell Byrd. His father could never have written, “… mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” nor, “We cannot choose what we are free to love,” nor, “… the distortions of ingrown virginity.” Could not have written, very likely not understood. And Graham wondered, Did
he
really understand? When Auden wrote, “… honor the vertical man, / Though we value none, / But the horizontal one”—did that mean what Graham believed that it did?
One day, leaving class in the crowd, Graham overheard this exchange:
“Do you think we’ll ever get to old Auden?”
“Maybe not. Maybe the old man has it in for queers.”
“But he is one. Haven’t you heard that? Everyone knows.”
Oh, you too, I’ll bet. That was what Graham wanted to say, but did not dare. Nor did he dare to believe what he had heard.
The roommates (“suite-mates,” as they were called, and in fact each man did have his own tiny room for sleep) all—usually all but Graham—went out to a great many movies at night. “A flick at the U.T., and then a couple of beers at the O.G.” was the standard description of an evening. U.T.—the University Theatre, O.G.—the Oxford Grill. Wednesdays were Revival Nights at the U.T.; the films revived were from the thirties, mostly, ten years back, with a few twenties treasures thrown in. They always politely asked Graham to come along, but much more often than not he refused. He said thanks, but he had a lot of reading to do. Or, more honestly, he said that for some reason he had not slept well the night before, and hoped to make up for it that night.
Sleep—elusive, stubbornly eluding him, it seemed. At night Graham’s mind announced, I’m busy thinking, I’m remembering everything that ever happened, every place or person that I ever saw, and what they said, and I’m scrambling in a frantic haste over fantasies of what will happen next, beginning tomorrow.
All the sounds of Cambridge made this sleeplessness worse, cars and horns and street shouts, the occasional ambulance or fire truck. A cacophonous conspiracy, preventing sleep.
And not sleeping well on one night did not guarantee a sound night’s sleep on the next, nor an early one, Graham found. Sometimes, lying awake, he yearned for the sounds he
was used to in Pinehill; only those sounds would allow him to sleep, would lull his troubled head: the tree frogs in the spring, the hum of pines in summer winds, the stray lone baying of a hound. A long train whistle.
Thus, when they all had gone off eagerly to see
Top Hat
(Fred and Ginger were perennial favorites with everyone), Graham was still at home alone. Truly tired, that night he went to bed early, and, amazingly, fell almost instantly asleep.
He woke slowly, sometime later, to the feel of someone in his bed with him. Hands on his back, hands reaching. Strongly aroused but still half asleep, he thought, Another dream, one more wet fantasy. But in the next instant he knew that this was not a dream; it was Paxton, his friend, now holding him, hard. Pressing, pushing in. So that Graham experienced first pain, then an unbearably escalating pleasure. Pleasure that made him suddenly scream before he could stop the sound. But Paxton cried out too—they must be alone, and in another minute Paxton whispered, “It’s okay, they’re still out. I sneaked back.” A little pause. “I wanted you, I planned this. God, I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
Graham slowly turned around in his arms, and they kissed.
The next morning, though, having met for coffee by appointment at St. Clair’s, they spoke very seriously. They both knew what they had done and meant to continue to do—something for which, if apprehended (Jesus, apprehended!), they could both be thrown out of Harvard. And they could be permanently labeled. In many ways ruined, for life.
Paxton’s face was dark and narrow, as his body was. A long thin pale face, with a very high white forehead, a long thin nose, and narrow green-gray eyes. A serious (and sensual!)
wide mouth. Very quietly he said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Graham’s heart froze as he watched Paxton’s face, and waited. As he thought that Paxton was going to say, You know we can’t ever do that again. I didn’t like it. Let’s try to be friends. I have this girl.…
But Paxton said none of those things. What he said was, “This is something very serious for me—I mean, what I feel is serious, and I think you too—?”
“Yes. Christ! Yes,” Graham breathed.
A taut smile from Paxton, “Well, we have to plan. We can’t just meet, any old way—tumble into bed of an afternoon.”
Hearing those words, Graham experienced a quick jerk of desire as he thought, We can’t? We can’t right now—?
“The thing is,” Paxton continued, “I have all this money. My grandfather—this trust—this month—I’m eighteen. I mean, I could rent an apartment—”
“I’ve got some money too.”
Paxton smiled. “Well, we’re lucky, aren’t we?”
For discretion, they did not go apartment hunting together. Paxton simply called a friend of his father’s, a trustee of his trust, who just happened to own a building.